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I went to Napoli a few days back. The first two days I did nothing except lie in bed and cough and shiver. Ate breakfast cereal for dinner the second day because all the shops and restaurants had closed when I woke up. Anyway, I was determined to get to Pompeii, so I stayed an extra night and headed out on the third day.

I could probably say something thoughtful about the flagellation scene at the Villa deii Misterii, but right now I don’t have the nodes. Or the lobes. My brain hurts already: I’m not going to try to think.

Anyway, here’s a loving couple engaged in an apparent spanking, taken from the wall of the underground baths.

They’re as eccentric a line-up, in their various ways, as the Medieval Catholic saints.

Marie Bonaparte for example, great grandniece of the Emperor Napoleon, had such faith in the doctrine of female masochism that she “discovered” the masochistic ovum.

She believed that because eggs are female and they are beaten by the head of the penis during intercourse – Bam! Bam! Bam! – they come to enjoy that pounding. This, she concluded, is the cause of the essential masochism of women. As a Freudian true believer, Bonaparte had to believe in the essential masochism of women.

Clitoris, getting the hell out of Marie Bonaparte’s way.

In one of the more amazing demonstrations of faith that any disciple has ever given a cult leader, Bonaparte had her clitoris surgically relocated closer to her vaginal entrance, so that she complied with Freud’s directives on the superiority of vaginal orgasms.

She needed another operation later, to fix the mess made by the first operation. Her Freudian wound never healed.[i]

Sometimes people in the bdsm community – that would include me – talk about discrimination against people who are known to be involved in bdsm.

For example, there was a Cabinet Minister in New Zealand who was outed by right-wing nutters as belonging to a bdsm club. That ended his political career.

Women who have any sort of public profile can’t afford to be open about being dom, or submissive. People wrongly think a submissive is a doormat, and no women who is outed as someone who enjoys getting a good flogging in bed, or being tied up, artfully, is going to get to have a political career. (There are many out lesbians in politics where I live, but no out submissive women.) They won’t get to be Businesswoman of the Year, either, no matter how great their achievements are.

The BDSM Rights flag

They’re also more likely to get raped, by guys who think that a submissive is a victim to be preyed upon. And in court, they will find that if they are submissive, they don’t have a right to complain about being raped or beaten up. There’s a British case where a woman was brutally raped, but her rapist’s defence established that she was into submission.

The judge said to the jury, “What was this young man to think, when he discovered a riding crop by her bed? When he saw those magazines?” The jury found the young rapist not guilty, and the judge commended their verdict.

And so on. There are a lot of out gay men in Parliament where I live, on both sides of politics. But if I stood, and someone pointed out that I’ve been known to flog and cane women, and so on (see this blog for further details), the fact that it was for those women’s pleasure wouldn’t matter at all. I’d be de-selected as a candidate so fast it’d make my ears rotate. Widdershins.

Adult couples outed for practicing consensual bdsm with each other, in private, have lost custody of their children as a consequence.

So we are subject to discrimination.

And after Orlando, I thought, is it unthinkable that someone fired by by some mix of religious frenzy, hatred and (perhaps) self-loathing, could go and shoot up a bdsm club, mainly involving heterosexuals. And I had to say that it’s not unthinkable.

In the local bdsm club, I’ve seen submissive women fucked publicly by their masters (under the table, where the club staff can’t see them), men and women almost naked on the whipping frame, male and female doms leading their boy or girl on a leash, and so on. So, yes, I can imagine some holy nutcase with a gun deciding to cleanse the earth one pervert at a time, by blasting us all to hell.

Holy book (one of them) and Golden Shower

We’ll politely ignore, for now, the fact that the holy books of the Judaic, Christian and Muslim monotheisms specifically endorse keeping man and women as slaves, and women in particular as sex slaves.

But there are distinctions between the shit rained upon LGBTI people and bdsm people. For example, I remember when I was new to the internet, going to an IRC bdsm chat-room. An American woman took a fancy to my … typing, I guess, and enticed me into her own chatroom.

A little later I started getting hate messages from Nazis, attempted hacking attacks, flooding and various other kinds of cyber-bullying. Then one of them looked at this chatroom I was in, and he apologised. The American woman had named her chatroom #bendover, and the Nazis had thought it was a gay room. When they realised that it was a bdsm room, and mostly involving women submissives and male doms, they had no problem with us.

I can’t say I felt good about that. I feel better when Nazis hate me.

The rainbow and loving

But it does illustrate that people into bdsm have various advantages over gays and lesbians, and so on, in relation to persecution. I can go out with a slavegirl, who is wearing my collar and a slavegirl anklet, and a flappy little tartan skirt with no knickers, so she knows she risks giving a flash of recently-caned arse of she isn’t careful, holding hands, and no-one will notice.

Except maybe someone else who’s into bdsm and can see and read the signs. We risk getting smiled at, in a conspiratorial way.

But if I were a gay man, holding hands with my loved one, outside the city and a few safe suburbs, would mean risking getting beaten up. The risk of getting killed just for that is small, but it’s not zero. A lot of people hate and fear all kinds of sexual differences. Gays, lesbians, transgender people and intersex people cop the worst of it; there’s no doubt of that.

So we, as fellow perverts in the world’s eyes, need to make sure we stand up for each other. That damn rainbow, we’re part of it whether we like it or not.

There’s also the issue of cross-over. Gay men and lesbians make up a tiny proportion on the population as a whole, about two-three per cent. But they make up a bigger proportion of the bdsm community: about 8-10 per cent. So we need to be together, politically.

The attack in Orlando, and other violent or repressive acts of homophobia are aimed at a minority sexuality that I’m not part of. But they’re still an attack on all sexual difference: I could have been in that club, or a similarly motivated killer could have come to mine.

Gays and lesbians are fighting for equality, particularly in relation to marriage, and people involved in bdsm are fighting to remove ridiculous anti-bdsm censorship laws. Though boringly straight, I’ve written submissions to Parliamentary Select Committees in relation to gay decriminalisation, and marriage equality, and I’ve been on marches and so on.

The rainbow and living

I’ve written a book that (among other things) summarises the current state of research into the effects of porn, and of bdsm porn in particular, which tends to tear the ground out from under the people who want to censor and silence our media. I hope it’ll have some impact. Both kinds of activism are part of the same project, really.

Anyway, attacks on one of us, or one segment of us, are attacks on all of us. We need to share griefs, and share our determination and energy to fight back.

This is another in the series Happily Whipping Jesus, which is about bdsm in religious art. Mostly Christian art, but I’ll bring in examples from the art of other religions as I find them. The earlier posts can be found here and here.

Anyway, here are some more images of the Penitent Magdalena, who Medieval Christians decided was a sex worker, which for various reasons is highly improbable, even if you accept the Bible as a reliable source for … well, anything, really. She is supposed to have spent the years after Jesus’ death living in a cave and whipping herself, when the desire took her. Er, the desire to purify herself. But see the fourth of today’s images.

1 Here’s Mary Magdalena with a whip of thorns. (It’s a coiled whip, not Jesus’ crown of thorns. If the crown of thorns had been that big it would have slipped down past his ears and hung round his neck, causing embarrassment all round.) She contemplates it with a certain solemn anticipation.

She’s bared her breasts (1) so she can more effectively lash her own back and (2) the artist can paint some very pleasant tits.

The artist is Giovanni Francesco.

Or at least the original was. This is a copy made by another, unknown artist, for display in some Italian piazza. I think the image is a little too … distracting to have been used in a church.

2 Here’s one by Guido Reni, who may be my favourite Italian Renaissance painter. This is an image in which Magdalena’s hand is holding a swatch of her own hair, which looks like a whip, though when you look closer you see there isn’t a whip there. (Other Italian painters did the same thing, with Magdalena.)

But the bared breasts and the sensuous expression echo the pose and the emotional and sexual feeling of the more explicit paintings where Magdalena’s whip is shown.

3. In this image she’s in mid-whipping, stripped to the waist. Note the eyes focussed on the image of her Master, the little Jesus on a crucifix.

In this image she’s stripped to the waist, though the artist didn’t have the nerve to paint her saintly breasts. Instead we get her arm wielding the little scourge.

The artist is Giovanni Barbieri, known as “Guercino”, I’m afraid that in my humble opinion he isn’t really very good.

4 This one exemplified the way that artists liked to use Maria Magdalena. She’s a religious figure and also a sexual one.

In a way the penitent Magdalene hearkens back to the ancient Greek and Roman flagellation cults, with that mixture of “spiritual” setting, extreme emotional arousal, and sexual arousal, which is found in a number of Christian saints. Here she is in a state of ecstasy, which you could call religious or you could call mid-orgasmic.

It looks like an orgasm, a good one, to me.

Or, if you think (as I do) that older kinds of religion are being mixed here with the more dour and anti-sex Christian tradition, you could say it’s both.

By the way, the skull she’s pressing against her lower belly is, tradition says, the skull of the late Jesus of Nazareth.

Is that healthy? Not really, but it is psychologically interesting.

The artist is (tip of the hat and thanks to Gretel, in the comments) Guido Cagnacci, 1663.

Here’s the collection of the whips that Katherine Anna of Austria used on herself. She was a minor member of Austria’s royal family who lived in the 1600’s. Presumably she sat around someone’s palace doing needlework and whipping herself until she was married off to a minor prince somewhere. I haven’t been able to find out much about her: she didn’t trouble history, much.

Her collection of scourges, for whipping herself when she felt she was a bad girl, is kept in the Schatzkammer, or Imperial Treasury, in the Hofburg Palace in Vienna.

It’s not a very good photo, because the whips were behind glass in a darkened room, but I hope you can see enough to note that her whips were quite lovingly made. They have decorations, but they also have metal tips. Any of them would have hurt, and you’d have to be careful not to draw blood. I doubt if she was careful.

This is, I guess, one of the benefits of religion: it licences extreme states of consciousness and sensuality, while providing spiritual rhetoric as a framework. Katherine Anna is likely to have been “protected” from knowledge about sexual feelings in women, and at the same time told that women are the most licentious of all creatures, who have to keep their sexual urges firmly curbed.

Being a good and faithful believer, she’d reach for the scourges when her thoughts became troubled. Perhaps she thought about a servant in tight breeches, and the curve of his buttock and upper thigh. In any case, the scourge hurt for the first few lashes, as she swung it over her own shoulder to cut into her bare back. Then endorphins kicked in to cover the pain.

She can feel her mind ease, as the pain starts to recede and pleasurable feelings replace the pain. She is presumably staring up at a three-quarter likeness of a near-naked man, bound with nails to a post with a cross-bar. She looks into his wooden or marble eyes, and sometimes at the muscles of his belly and thighs. He seems to stare back at her, sharing her pain. She has partially bared her body for him, so that she can reach her bare back to apply the whip. She hardly dares wonder if he likes what he sees.

And then she feels a racking moment of great joy: her troubled thoughts, her pain, everything, recedes for a few seconds while her body shakes. Oddly, after that moment of sweet, spiritual reward, she feels no further sexual desire, for a while.

This is a marble relief of the scourging of Jesus, made in the 17th century. It’s a photo I took in the Vienna Schatzkammer, or Imperial Treasury, in the Hofburg Palace in Vienna.

What’s interesting about it is the erotic depiction of Jesus, lying on his back, with his hands tied, and a slightly floaty, dreamy expression on his face while the man on the right whips him.

The spectator on the left is clearly enjoying the show. That seems to be an erection poking his robes up, and his hand hovers near his cock.

All four men in this image have happy expressions. The face of the man with the whip shows slightly ludicrous glee. I guess I’ve looked a bit like that too, when the flogging is proceeding well and the girl is in sub-space and all’s right with the world.

It’s interesting because it shows awareness of bdsm on the part of the anonymous artist. I’d have thought it was an anti-bdsm image, showing that men who respond sexually to causing pain are wicked, if it wasn’t that the face of the Jesus suggests that he’s in a blissful state himself.

There are medieval images of the scourging of Jesus that show that the men doing the whipping have erections, but those are less ambiguous in their condemnation of the minority sexual taste. In those images the guys with whips are depicted as barely human, almost demonic, while the Jesus figure is depicted with flecks of blood on his body and his face contorted in agony. In this one, they all seem to be happy participants, like the guys in the Spanner Case.

It’s also interesting, like some of the descriptions of religious flagellation in classical Greek and Latin texts, for showing the ways in which religion and bdsm can, er, bleed into each other. Both approve of extreme states of consciousness, and valorise willing subjection to physical pain, but religion provides a non-sexual framework that people can use to explain what they, or their saintly martyrs, are experiencing. Without talking about sexual pleasure.

Finally, it’s interesting that this image is far more “blasphemous” than anything like Andre Serrano’s Piss Christ, and yet it was accepted in its time as a sacred image.

An note on Piss Christ

I think Piss Christ is a beautiful image, which is different from it being a great work of art. A photo of Amanda Seyfried naked is likely to be beautiful too, but that doesn’t mean the photographer is a great artist.

However, it seems to me to be strongly pro-Christ in its message: that Christ, immersed in the human, is still radiant.

It isn’t blasphemous. As a non-believer with some active dislike for Christianity and Islam, in particular (also communism and fascism, for similar reasons), I like blasphemous art and wish there was more of it. And Piss Christ isn’t it.

But Christian art can be very moving as art even though the “message” doesn’t move me. I don’t let my dislike of Christianity as a worldview get in the way of admiring and responding to the St Matthew Passion, or the altarpieces of Tilman Riemanschneider.

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